Senior Data Engineer

Data moves fast, and the businesses that win are the ones whose data can keep up with their ambition. That is the problem this role exists to solve, and it is a genuinely interesting one.As our Senior Data Engineer at Protein Works, you will be the person who owns the pipelines, the warehouse, and the data infrastructure that the rest of the business quietly depends on every single day. Not for the sake of a tidy architecture diagram, and not to build something impressive that nobody queries. For leverage: making decision-making across marketing, trading, operations and finance faster, more trustworthy, and more commercially effective by building infrastructure the business actually relies on.This role sits inside a growing and highly capable Business Intelligence team, at the heart of Protein Works' AI transition. That means you will be laying clean, well-governed foundations that let AI workflows, agents, and analytical tooling deliver real value, not inheriting someone else's half-finished setup. You will work across our Google Cloud data stack, connect APIs and pipelines into coherent systems, and take ownership of the full journey from initial brief through to a pipeline running reliably in production. If you are the kind of engineer who takes pride in clean pipelines, fast queries, and infrastructure that just works, this is a role worth reading on about.About Protein WorksFounded in 2012 on a clear conviction: the sports nutrition industry had become complacent, and there was a better way to do it. Over a decade later, we are a £50m business with five consecutive years of double-digit growth, a brand new £10m campus in Liverpool, and ambitions that go well beyond where we are today.We are growing, investing and hiring with purpose. If you want to join a business with the energy of a challenger and the foundations of a market leader, this is the right moment to do it.What you will be doingOwning BI infrastructure end-to-end, from initial brief and requirement gathering through to data pipeline development across APIs, ETL, ELT and SQLWorking alongside Data Analyst colleagues to help them generate impactful business insights and analysisTaking day-to-day responsibility for the quality, security and performance of our Data Lake and WarehouseBuilding and maintaining robust CI/CD processes for data pipelines using tools such as Cloud Build and GitHub, raising the standard of how code is tested, deployed and version-controlledProactively monitoring pipeline health, optimising performance, and managing infrastructure costs to ensure efficient scalingApplying strong data modelling, semantic consistency and metadata discipline so data is discoverable and usable by both humans and AI toolsPartnering with function-specific AI engineers and analysts to understand their data needs and unblock them quicklyUsing AI tooling to accelerate your own engineering, from code generation to pipeline documentation to data quality checksChampioning knowledge sharing and best practice across the team and wider businessWhat success looks likeDemonstrable data engineering experience with a data warehouse platform, with pipelines and infrastructure you can point toExtremely strong SQL skills, non-negotiableSignificant hands-on experience integrating APIs into real, production data flowsExperience with the Google Cloud Platform data stack, including BigQuery, Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, IAM Management, and Data StudioStrong working knowledge of Python for pipeline development, automation, and tooling integrationHands-on experience with Cloud Build and GitHub for version control and CI/CDA working understanding of how to keep data AI-ready: strong modelling, semantic consistency, and metadata discipline that both humans and AI tools can rely onComfortable working across the full data landscape that a growing DTC business touches: marketing, trading, operations and financeAble to take a messy brief and turn it into a structured, working pipeline without needing it handed to you step by stepA high personal standard for detail and communication, because the data you ship becomes the truth other teams build decisions onA degree is not required for this role. What matters is what you have built, what you can show, and how you think about problems.Nice to have: hands-on experience with dbt, Dataform or equivalent transformation and orchestration frameworks; familiarity with Terraform or equivalent infrastructure-as-code tooling; comfort with vector databases, embeddings, or semantic search; and working knowledge of Google's marketing stack, including Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Ads and Google Search Console.You are the kind of person who designs for systems running reliably without you, not for you firefighting them. You ask whether a pipeline will hold up at scale before you ship it. You are commercially grounded enough to connect every piece of infrastructure back to speed, cost, or trust in the numbers, and you are honest enough to flag a problem rather than let bad data quietly spread. You are energised by pace, not exhausted by it, and you are comfortable in an environment where the team is figuring things out together. Twelve months from now, success looks like this: the data platform is faster and more trustworthy, AI workflows across the business are running on foundations you built, and you are already halfway through the next problem.What you will getExclusive staff discountsPrivate healthcareBirthday day offPension schemeUnique bonus schemeCycle to work schemeAccess to retail discountsStaff socials and eventsState of the art PW CampusWFH on FridaysRefreshments on-siteREF-229 659TPBN1_UKTJ